Drug delivery devices allowing for multiple dosing of a required dosage of a liquid medicinal product and further providing administration of such liquid drug to a patient, are as such well-known in the prior art. Generally, such devices have substantially the same purpose as that of an ordinary syringe.
Drug delivery devices of this kind have to meet a number of user specific requirements. For instance in case of those with diabetes, many users will be physically infirm and may also have impaired vision. Therefore, these devices need to be robust in construction, yet easy to use, both in terms of the manipulation of the parts and understanding by a user of its operation. Further, the dose setting must be easy and unambiguous and where the device is to be disposable rather than reusable, the device should be inexpensive to manufacture and easy to dispose. In order to meet these requirements, the number of parts and steps required to assemble the device and an overall number of material types the device is made from have to be kept to a minimum.
Typically, the medicinal product to be administered is provided in a cartridge having a moveable piston or bung mechanically interacting with a piston rod of a drive mechanism of the drug delivery device. By applying thrust to the piston in distal direction, a certain and pre-defined amount of the medicinal fluid is expelled from the cartridge.
Manufacturing and final assembling of such drug delivery devices is implemented in a mass-production process. Typically, various components of the drug delivery device are manufactured and/or even pre-configured by different suppliers. In particular with disposable devices, the cartridge containing the medicament has to be positioned in a respective cartridge holder component prior to a final assembly of cartridge holder and body of the drug delivery device.
In a typical end-assembly scenario two sub-assemblies have to be assembled with each other. For instance, a first sub-assembly comprises a cartridge holder and the cartridge disposed therein. The second sub-assembly comprises a housing or body of the drug delivery device comprising a drive mechanism adapted to become operably engaged with the moveable piston of the cartridge either during assembly or prior to an initial use of the device.
Since the final assembly is conducted almost entirely automatically, the sub-assemblies have to be provided in a well-defined and ordered way. Hence, the sub-assemblies have to be correctly oriented and disposed on a respective support structure.
Such support structures typically comprise a workpiece carrier or transport tray which is adapted to receive a plurality of sub-assemblies and/or components of the drug delivery device.
Optimization of transportation in terms of required storage or shipping space is a persistent aim for reducing costs of manufacture and logistics in mass production processes.
It is an object of the invention to provide an improved workpiece carrier for transporting and/or storing components of a drug delivery device that can be stacked on one another in a space saving way, both, when empty and/or when populated with drug delivery device components. Furthermore, the workpiece carrier should be robust and stable in construction as well as light weight and cost-efficient in production.